


Lull

by HomuraRequests (HomuraBakura)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-09 18:48:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13487553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HomuraBakura/pseuds/HomuraRequests
Summary: When the storm ends, the winds drop, the world comes to a quiet lull.  What do we do with what the storm took from us, and what do we do with what was left behind?





	Lull

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AngelofMuses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelofMuses/gifts).



His ears are ringing so loudly that for a good few moments, he doesn’t realize how quiet it’s become.

Reiji sits slowly, ears popping slightly.  His shoulders feel oddly bare and uncomfortable without the weight of his scarf, and he wonders briefly what’s happened to it.  He remembers after his eyes glance across the shape of Tsukikage, who is just now coming to, that it was lost when Tsukikage rescued him from Zarc’s assault.

Zarc.

His heart rings in his ears, now, as a panic overtakes him, forcing him up to his feet, causing him to spin around and look for the dark stain of the great dragon overhead—

It is nowhere to be seen.  But that’s not even the most curious part.

The strangest part of the whole thing is that he appears to have awoken in the middle of a wholly untouched Academia courtyard.  

It is...his eyes can’t quite comprehend it at first, and his vision actually swims.  He sways, and Tsukikage is on his feet in a second, catching him by the arm and helping steady him.  Tsukikage hardly looks steady on his feet himself, though, so Reiji carefully extracts himself from his grip, so as to not drag them both back down to the ground.

After giving his eyes a moment to adjust, the world seems to settle, and everything becomes a little bit clearer.  Yes, he is standing in the middle of Academia’s courtyard, but it looks...different.

Aside from the fact that it is not torn to pieces and in fact looks brand new, none of the military banners he remembers before hand from any of the walls.  The flag pole seems to have a generic Japanese flag fluttering at the time, with a lower flag that has some kind of school crest that he does not remember before.  The architecture itself, even is oh so slightly different; something about the shape of the windows, or the feel of the stone beneath his feet.

Around him there are others, he realizes next.  They are all in varying states of awakeness: most are Academia students, who sit up blearily.  Some of them have not yet awoken, others sit with their heads between their knees, mumbling to themselves, one or two have actually started to stagger around, checking in on a few still prone next to them.

Reiji’s father is waking slowly beside him, groaning.

He, too looks eerily different.  The metal apparatus from his forehead is gone, and he appears to have hair again, and though the heavy lines of age still mark his face, the shape of his chin seems somehow younger.  Reiji’s vision swims once again, but then settles, and Akaba Leo attempts to sit up, squinting.

“Tsukikage,” Reiji says, turning his attention away from his father.  “If you feel able, please take a look around.  Something is wrong.”

Tsukikage nods, and vanishes without a sound.  Reiji remains where he is, staring almost aimlessly at the world around him.

He wonders, for a moment, what’s happened to the others.  Edo, Sora, Shun, Kaito, Gongenzaka, Jack, Sawatari, Crow, the rest.  He looks around the courtyard, but does not spot them.  Nor, he thinks with a twist of his stomach, does he see Reira.

Tsukikage reappears, and Reiji jumps in spite of himself.  He presses the heel of his hand against his heart, silently telling himself to get a grip.

“What did you find?” he says.  “That was quick.”

Tsukikage looks...uneasy.  He nods towards the end of the courtyard, and Reiji follows the gaze.  At the end of the courtyard, there is a long, dark archway.  He remembers this from the assault, it leads out towards the main campus.

He hears the faintest sound, then, over the faint murmuring and nervous mutterings of the waking Academia students.  Something like...something large, being dragged across the ground.

He feels his face go cold as the blood rushes from it.

The shape is familiar, but it is not.  Still, his vision does not swim like it did before.  He sees her all too clearly.  He knows who she is.

Akaba Ray drags herself forward, step by clearly painful step, into the courtyard.  She has what appears to be Reira over one shoulder, and the other arm...

She has her arm hooked awkwardly beneath his, face strained as she tries to pull him along after her.  He is tall, older than Reiji, perhaps, with silver hair that glints with faint green streaks.

Reiji hesitates only a breath longer before he hurries forward, more for Reira than for anything.

Ray sees him coming towards her, but doesn’t respond.  Her face is red with exertion from carrying both limp bodies.  Reiji doesn’t know what he should say, either, and he reaches for Reira.  Ray lets the child go easily, and Reiji gathers Reira into his arms, having to go down on one knee to really support him.

“Reira.  Reira,” Reiji says.

“He’s fine,” Ray says, and it is, Reiji thinks, the first time he has heard her speak.  It...if he has to make a guess, she sounds more like Yuzu than she does Selena, and yet, her voice is also her own.  “He’s exhausted. He used a lot of energy to get me out of Arc V.”

Reiji finally looks up at her.

 _Sister_ , he thinks, but he feels no connection to the word, nor to her.  He wonders if she feels the same.

She looks simply exhausted.  There are dark circles under her eyes, her hair is coming out of her pigtails and sticking in parts to her sweaty face, her clothes are rumpled and there are faint tear tracks left across her cheeks.  Heaviness drags down every part of her body.

Reiji chances a glance for the man she drags with her, the man that, he thinks with a faint clench of panic, that he must know exactly who it is.

“That’s Zarc,” he says.

She nods.

“He’s...”

“Powerless.  He can’t do any harm anymore.  And neither can I.”

Reiji looks up at her again, but she’s not looking at him anymore.  Her eyes are dull and sightless, staring at nothing.  She looks like a dead woman walking.

“Why did you bring him?” is all Reiji can think to say.

Ray licks her lips and tries once, twice, to get the words out.

“Because I think he’s going to need medical attention,” she says.  “And so am I.”

Reiji hears his father let out a plaintive cry behind him as Ray keels forward.  It’s all Reiji can do to half stand, still holding Reira in one arm, and try to catch her.  Luckily, Tsukikage appears behind him, steadying them both.

“Come on,” he says softly.  “I believe the medical ward, at least, is still the same.”

*    *    *

Reiji still has not found out what happened to the others.

He sits, silently, staring at nothing, in a chair that is too uncomfortable for him.  This medical ward has enough space to care for nearly twenty people, but only three of the beds are taken.  Reira is in the one closest to Reiji.  In front of him him is where Ray is fast asleep, Leo hovering over her.

In the one on the other side of the aisle from that, Zarc sleeps.

Reiji tries not to look at him.

He just sits, staring.  Becoming one with the plastic chair.  He feels it, then, the same heaviness that claimed Ray.  What is he doing here?  What is he _supposed_ to be doing?  His team is gone.  He has no idea what’s happened to them.  His father, the enemy he had trained for three years to take down, is now leaning with his head in his hands over the silent form of his sleeping daughter, in the same room as Reiji, without conflict.  Academia has changed in strange, miniscule ways that makes him want to throw up when he notices them, like some sick game of spot the difference.

He hasn’t even tried to contact Standard yet.  He’s afraid to.

Somehow, his battle has been won, and yet...it doesn’t _feel_ won.

He wants Ray to wake up, and give him answers.

The door flings open, slamming against the opposite wall, and Leo looks up, lips curling as he opens his mouth, probably to tell whoever it is to be quiet.  Reiji turns his head over his shoulder.

He is surprised to realize the relief that crashes through him, when he sees that the person in the doorway is Shiunin Sora.

The boy’s face is white, his hair falling from its ponytail, jacket rumpled as though he just threw it on as he ran.  He bolts across the space and skids to a swaying stop in front of Reiji.

“What happened?” he says, and the crack in his voice betrays his youth, and Reiji is hit very strongly with the realization that _none_ of them are old enough for this.

Reiji feels his shoulders slump, feels the mask of the unaffected leader flittering away out of his reach, and he can tell when Sora notices the crack in his armor because his own shoulders slump and he looks, for a moment, dizzy.

“I don’t know,” Reiji whispers, and his eyes flicker once again to the sleeping face of Akaba Ray.

Sora’s eyes follow, and for a moment, he goes white.  His lips form a different name, but no sound comes out with it.  His eyes swing back to Reiji and he leans forward, grabbing Reiji’s scarf and yanking on it.

“Where is Yuzu?” he says.

Reiji closes his eyes and feels the hollowness growing in the place where his soul should be again.

“Where did you wake up?” he asks, turning it back on Sora.

He feels Sora’s hands dig into his scarf, and for a moment, he thinks Sora might start strangling him.  He almost senses the faint movement of Tsukikage, where he has been hovering in the shadows, but makes no move to halt either of them.

Sora’s hands loosen.

“In my room.  In the Academia barracks.”

“Have you seen any of the others?  Edo?”

“Edo woke up in the courtyard.  He’s trying to keep everyone calm.  Um...I found Dennis too...he told me he woke up in the barracks too.  We split up to look for someone.”

Reiji is unwillingly starting to put some of the pieces together.

“If we’ve all been sent back to our homes,” he thinks out loud.  “Why did I not return to Standard?”

“Because I messed up.”

The voice comes from Ray’s bed, and Reiji opens his eyes to see that she is awake, staring up at the ceiling.  Leo leaps up, trying to hold her hand, mumble something about resting, but Ray extracts her hand from his and sits up against his protests.  She seems older than she is, her body looking jerky and stiff as she moves herself into a sitting position.  Her eyes can’t quite meet Reiji’s, but he knows that she’s talking to him, answering his question.

“I tried to put it back.  Not back to the original dimension, but back to the four I made before.  Split us all up again.  But there wasn’t enough power.  It was already almost not enough to make me solid again.  Reira had to overdraw his own energy to give me enough to get out.  I had the cards, but not enough energy, and not enough time to gather it.”

She talks slowly, monotonously, as though she’s reading out of a textbook.

“What _did_ you do, then?” Sora says, staring at her, his hands shaking.

“Put things back,” Ray says.  “The dimensions came back together into one.  Heartland, City, Academia, Maiami—the four unique cities have just been plopped back where they were before the split.  I put everyone who was here back where they would have gone.”

Her eyes shift, and she briefly catches Reiji in her gaze before looking away.

“You were harder.  You were too close to the origin point.  You stayed here because that’s where he and I were.”

She swallows.

“There wasn’t enough to rewrite memories this time, either.  So everyone’s going to remember what happened.  The way the world was before.”

Her hands shake ever so slightly in her lap.  She won’t meet anyone’s gaze.  Leo tries to hold her hands again, but Ray moves them away.  Leo looks briefly shocked and hurt.  Reiji almost feels bad.  Almost.

“Ray, you did what you could, and you saved everyone,” Leo says, soft, cajoling.  “Ray.  Ray, look at me.”

Her jaw clenches, and she does not.  Leo opens his mouth again.

A groan rises up from the other side of the room, cutting him off.  The bed across from Ray creaks and the covers shift.  Reiji sees arms flail upwards, briefly, and then, Zarc is awake.

He shoots straight upwards in the bed.  His arms briefly tangle in the sheets and he lets out a wordless, frightened cry, fighting and kicking to get free.  He goes tumbling to the floor.  It all happens so quickly that Zarc is still struggling with the bed sheets on the floor by the time Reiji manages to stand up.

Ray is faster.

Her legs swing over the side and she crosses the aisle, ignoring Leo swiping a hand for her.

“Zarc,” she says.  “ _Zarc_.”

Zarc’s eyes fly up from the sheets, wild and wide and barely seeing anything.  His eyes are gold, shining—but other than that, look _exactly_ like Yuya’s.

For the barest half a breath, he and Ray just stare at each other.

Then Zarc makes a strangled sound, and there’s a blur of motion, and suddenly Ray is on the ground, Zarc straddled on top of her, his hands wrapped around her throat and pressing all of his weight down onto her.

Leo lets out an angry roar, launching forward and trying to shove Zarc off of his daughter.  Zarc is stronger than his slender form implies, however, and Leo grabs at his arms and throat and yanks to no avail. Reiji leaps forward too, grabbing Zarc under the arms and trying to pull him back, but he throws his weight forward into his stranglehold.  Sora is shouting, Reiji thinks he hears the name _Yuya_ several times, Tsukikage is trying to grab Zarc at the elbows and bend his grip free.

All the while, Zarc screams.

 _“Bitch!”_ he shouts, over and over.   _“You took them—where—who am—where am—my dragons, where are my dragons, give them back, give them back, give them back—”_

Tears roll down his cheeks and onto Ray’s face.  Reiji isn’t sure what surprises him the most: the tears, or the fact that Ray does absolutely nothing to stop Zarc’s assault.  She just lays there, staring at him as her face starts to turn red, her arms limp at her side, making no move to struggle free.

Something seems to snap.  Zarc’s hands release Ray suddenly, and he falls backwards all at once from the combined efforts of the people holding him—though the movement is so sudden, that Reiji, Leo, and Tsukikage all lose their grip on him, staggering forward themselves.

Zarc falls backwards against the back of the bed.  He gasps for breath as though he is hyperventilating, eyes still wide and bubbling upwards with tears that leave tracks down his cheeks.

“Where am I?” he mumbles, over and over.  He grips his head between his hands, fingers digging into his hair.  “Who am I...what am I...? Odd-Eyes, where are you, where are you, where are you...”

Reiji feels something in his stomach twist, as he sits up and simply watches the young man sit there and tremble, begging for answers but clearly not coherent enough to understand them.

 _He’s human_ , he thinks.   _He’s human, and he is broken._

Gone, completely, is the demon they faced before.  All that is left before them is the human shell.

Ray sits up, coughing slightly.  Leo tries to hurry forward, support her, but she once again ignores him.  She shifts forward on her knees and crawls towards Zarc.

The young man flinches when Ray puts her arms around him.  But Ray isn’t attacking, isn’t hurting.  She’s...hugging him.  Just hugging him, holding him softly, barely moving..

Zarc closes his eyes and begins to cry.

*    *    *

It seems that it was easier than Reiji would have thought to combine four dimensions together.  The four unique cities slotted quite neatly into the world he once knew.  Academia takes up an isolated artificial island in the middle of the ocean, some miles east off the coast of Maiami that hadn’t been there before in Reiji’s world.  Somehow, he had never thought to even question the largely barren, undeveloped flat landscapes along the coast to the north and south of Maiami, where now Heartland and the City had appeared respectively.  There are even highways and connecting throughways already in place, as though these places have been connected forever.

The non-unique cities have simply had their mirrored populations combined together.  Somehow, the world that Ray had made before caused no one at all to question why cities were nearly always only one fourth as full as they should be, and some buildings were simply not occupied in one dimension or another.  Not a single person suddenly found themselves in another’s home.  The cities simply did not overlap at all.  The world slotted neatly back together without comment.

Himika actually hugs him when he walks through the front doors, and it feels so startling that Reiji simply freezes, holding stock still in her grip without making a movement to hug her back.

It startles him, then, just how little he recognizes the woman that he is supposed to call his mother.

“Reiji,” she says, in a kind voice that doesn’t suit her, cupping his face in her hands.  He remembers, vaguely, a different woman who has the same face as this one, to whom smiling like that was more suitable.  He’s not sure what happened to her, but he feels for a moment as though part of his reason for going to war was because of her, the woman who no longer exists save as the echo in front of him.  “You did it, Reiji.”

This is even more startling than the hug, and he cannot answer, he can only stand there with his lips parted, trying to wrap his head around the words.

“What _did_ I do?” he says, and his voice cracks.

His mother only smiles a little more and stands up to kiss him on the forehead.

“You completed your mission, didn’t you?  The dimensions are safe.  Your father was stopped.”

He supposes, in the vaguest sense of the word, she’s right.  The invasion is over, the dimensions were put back to where they ought to be, those who were carded—even those who were killed, according to Ray—are back to normal.

He didn’t do anything, though.  So he’s not sure why she’s congratulating him.

Her eyes slip over his shoulder and only then does she see the woman behind him, and for a moment, her brow furrows—with disgust?  Confusion?  Uncertainty?  He hates that he finds the expression suits her better than the smile she wore before.

“Mother,” he says woodenly.  “This is Ray.”

*    *    *

Ray can’t stay in Academia, with the man she can’t recognize as her father.  She can’t stay in the halls of the place that part of her body still remembers with hairs raised on the back of her arms and the echoes of screaming children.

Heartland is no good, either, because that was where she had put Shun, and she can still remember the feeling of relief when he had held the other her, relief that her brother was finally here to protect her, the brother that wasn’t hers and that she couldn’t claim.  She can’t face him, either.

The City has no one waiting for the other her, which should have made it the obvious choice.  But instead the memories are waiting there, ripping and tearing at the edges of her frayed soul and reminding her of the bright, happy smile she will no longer see, the torn up motorcycle that no longer exists, the man that she shattered into pieces and left half dead.

Maiami seems the worst of the bunch because here, there are a thousand thousand faces that she remembers from the other her, faces that make her want to collapse to her knees and curl up until she melts away and everyone forgets her.

But when Reiji asks if she would like to come with him, to bring the broken Zarc, where there might be better facilities to take care of him and no glowering father who looks like he might want to rip him to pieces, she accepts.

Maiami is familiar to her.  It existed in the previous world.  It was where she used to live.

LDS, however, is new.  She clings to that newness, the halls that no other part of her ever walked before, a place without memories at all.  A place where she can feel like she’s floating, non-existent, like she doesn’t belong to anything or any one at all.

Himika doesn’t like her.  She isn’t upset about it.  Himika was never her mother in any reality, and the knowledge that Leo had a daughter without her probably stings despite her professed hatred of him.  It’s a shame that Himika won’t speak with her: she might have found that they had that much in common.

When she is not floating through the halls, pretending she doesn’t exist and avoiding every eye that looks at her, she is crunching herself into a broom closet, letting the darkness cradle her and help her make believe that she is using the cards again, shattering herself and him into pieces.

Him.

He’s here too.  He’s the reason she came.  Unlike her, the final powers she used broke him.  It was too much for him.  He’d been shattered into four pieces—eight pieces—once already.  She had only become four, but him...?  He had been one with his dragons, completely and utterly.  Shattering him apart had meant separating not only himself, but the dragons.

The second shattering had meant erasing the dragons entirely.

She had tried to stay with him, for a while.  Sitting beside his bed.  But it’s too much.

He cries in his sleep.  His hands flail and sometimes he chokes on a scream.  He wakes up, bleary eyed and confused, tries to attack her again but hasn’t the strength to do it.  Always begging. Always pleading. _Where are they?  Where are my dragons?  Who am I?  Where are my dragons?_

_Where are my dragons where are my dragons where are my dragons where are my dragons—_

People come by, sometimes.  They want to know what happened.

Gongenzaka finds his way to LDS first.  He stares at her, mouth open, when she’s too slow to hide away.  She escapes before he can hug her, before she can hear the name that isn’t hers on his lips, before she can cry.  She hears him talking in a low voice with Reiji through the door of the broom closet, hears his throat choke for a moment.

Later, she hears the floor creak on the other side of the door, and knows that he knows where she’s hidden herself.

“I’m not angry at you,” he says.

But how could he not be?  She doesn’t respond, and eventually, she hears his feet clip clopping away down the marble halls.

Sawatari is a more satisfying encounter, because he _is_ angry at her.

“Couldn’t you have done something better??” he snaps, face actually red.  He cared about them more than he admitted, Ray is sure.  More than he still admits.  “You fixed the world, that’s fine and dandy, but what about them???  You stole them!  You had all that power, and this is what you did with it?”

Ray closes her eyes and lets his anger wash over her, breathing out with a sigh of relief.   _Please.  Please hate me.  I made the worst possible mistakes_.

She’s almost disappointed when Reiji finally manages to shoo Sawatari out and tell him that they’ll talk later.  He turns to her then—her little brother, she thinks but does not feel—and apologizes.  She shakes her head, and goes back to the broom closet.

When Shun finally fights his way back to LDS, still dizzied and confused by the new geography, she almost hopes that maybe he’ll hit her when his fingers curl around her arm to stop her from running.

But instead, there are only tears in his eyes, as he grips her arms so tightly that she thinks it might leave bruises.  He opens and closes his mouth a hundred times but there is nothing in his throat.  His head finally falls down against her chest as he slides to the floor and he cries.  And Ray can’t help but cry with him.

She thinks, perhaps, she apologizes, but she’s not sure what, if anything, Shun says.

Maybe he apologized too.  But he has nothing to be sorry for.  It’s her fault, after all.

She’s not there, right away, when Yoko, Yushou, and Shuzo finally appear in the LDS lobby.  But she can hear them, can hear Yoko, her voice echoing around the lobby, demanding to talk to someone, demanding to know where her son is.  She hears Himika, trying to divert her attention, but Yoko won’t be dissuaded, she can’t be.

Reiji finally gets the message and hurries into the lobby, and Ray can see from where she is the way that Yoko swings her gaze immediately from Himika to him, demanding again, face red, eyes thick with tears, Yusho’s hand on her shoulder and Shuzo, just Shuzo, standing in the background, looking dull and quiet, staring at nothing.

It’s the first time that Ray ever sees Reiji cry.

She watches, frozen, as his knees crumple, as he claps his hand to his mouth and tries to still the silent sobs, see Yoko’s face immediately change from red to pale.

She sees Yoko wrap her arms around Reiji and hold him up and he actually hugs her back, burying his apologies against her shoulder while Himika just looks on, dumbfounded.

Ray can’t look at Shuzo.  She hides in the broom closet before Reiji takes Yoko and Yusho upstairs to where Zarc is sleeping.

She waits until nighttime to sleep free of the closet, the building cold and dark and empty.  It’s just the kind of place for her.

She walks up the stairs, towards the small medical bay.  She expects that Yoko and Yusho might still be there, but they are not.  Zarc is sleeping alone again.  She stands at the top of the bed, looking down at him for a long, long time.

“I really messed us up, huh.”

There’s no answer.  Of course there isn’t.

“I didn’t just take away your dragons.  I took you away from everyone who loved you.  Who loved each version of you.  I took the girls away from the people who loved them, too.”

Zarc breathes quietly.  For once, it seems, he isn’t dreaming.  She stares for a little while longer.  She walks around the bed, sits down in the plastic chair beside it and then, with a sigh, lays her head down across the bed, her ear resting against his chest.  She can hear his heartbeat, like a faint drum on the other side of the world.

“I feel like I know you,” she says.  Talking to someone who can’t respond is calming, in a way.  “We didn’t know each other at all, before.  Well.  A little bit, I guess.  Do you remember the first time we dueled?  I thought you were dazzling.  I don’t know if you remembered me, though.  We ended up in different circuits.  I was probably just another opponent to you.  To be honest, even though I loved our duel, it was the same for me.  Just another person to face off with before the next match.”

Her voice echoes around the room and something about it is making her heart feel less shaky.  Just...talking.  It’s nice.  To hear nothing but her own voice, and his heart.

“But I feel like I know you so much better than that, now.  Because I did.  Because I was Yuzu and Rin and Ruri and even Selena, and I knew you.  We knew you.  And...and that part of me misses you.”

She doesn’t cry.  She doesn’t have any tears left.

“That part of me makes me regret it.  Makes me regret not trying harder.  Maybe I could have reached you.  Maybe I wouldn’t have had to...to take them away from you.”

The dragons are gone.  She took them completely out of this universe, so that he couldn’t use their power again.  It was a wild, ridiculous attempt to stop him, to block him from his destructive power.

It is the worst mistake she’s ever made.

“Do you think there’s a way it could have been different?” she asks the broken, sleeping shell on the bed.  “Maybe if we hadn’t just been another opponent to each other.  Maybe if I had tried to get to know you.  Maybe if the other mes had tried a little harder to protect you.”

It’s so quiet, now.  There’s nothing in her head, nothing in her chest.  She feels like she’s going to float away.

“If I could do it again, I would,” she says.  “What about you?”

Zarc doesn’t answer.

Of course he doesn’t.  She’d have better luck talking to a corpse.

This time, her throat tightens with tears, and she sits up, leans back.  This is stupid.  What is she supposed to do now?  Sit in her cupboard until she dies?  Go looking for a way to change it back?  There isn’t a way.  The En Cards are gone too.

She tries to stand.

She realizes, then, that there is a hand curled around hers.

She looks down to see exhausted golden eyes staring back at her, clouded and uncertain, but absolutely looking right at her.  His mouth opens, and his fingers tighten a bit around hers.  It takes him a few tries to get the faint, coughing sound out of him.

“Me...” he whispers.  “Me...too.”

Ray doubles up over the hand gripped in Zarc’s, presses her face to the bed, and cries.

After a few beats, Zarc puts an awkward hand on her head, weakly stroking her hair.

“I...remember...you...” he whispers.  “And I...I wish...I had...done something...different.”

“I’m sorry,” she gasps.  “I’m sorry. This is my fault.”

She hears him weakly shake his head against the pillow.

“Not...just...you,” he whispers.

He swallows, and it takes an effort for him to speak.

“Let’s.....find a way.”

“Find a way to what?”

But Zarc has fallen asleep again, and Ray isn’t entirely positive if she dreamed this, or if he was even coherent.  She sits up again.  His hand is still in hers.

_Let’s find a way._

To what?  To live like this?  To fix this?

To go back to being the people they had been before?

Ray curls her fingers around his hand, and closes her eyes.  She doesn’t have the answers.

Tonight, maybe she doesn’t need them.

Not yet.


End file.
